Samuel Baudinette

Psychoanalysts, and the psychoanalytic ally curious, may find this upcoming event dedicated to a discussion of “French Psychoanalysis” organized by the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society of interest:

chicagopsychoanalyticsociety.org/event-6384842

“At the very instant that I write ’neuronal man,’ I contradict myself by addressing a reader and attempting to convince him according to an order of reasons and not an order of neurons.”

Jean Laplanche

“I will not deliver a lecture on Lacanianism. I don’t know whether it is still fashionable these days to read Lacan. It would, in any event, be advisable to recommend [him] to those who are not inclined to orthodoxy in their reading.”

Laplanche, “Seduction, Persecution, Revelation.”

In this passage Jean Laplanche speaks of “situating” and “setting adrift” Freud’s conception of sublimation (as inspiration). I find it odd that the editorial footnote locates Laplanche’s terminology here to Lacan when he is so obviously in conversation with Guy Debord (too?)!

You owe it to yourself to read this story if you haven’t ever done so before!

www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/t...

For whatever reason, whenever I read or think about DWW’s claim that “it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found,” I recall the line from “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “it is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!”

I think this is important because the concept of “metabolization” (or of metabole as transformation) is *central* to both Laplanche and Bion’s account of unconscious processes/thinking.

I would add: this is what Bion and Ignacio Matte-Blanco also attempted to theorize in their mathematical model of the mind and in their theory of thinking (although in a Kantian, rather than Hegelian, and a Kleinian, rather than Freudian, manner).

“Is there such a thing as non-binary thought? Can one ‘think the unthinkable?’ This is what Hegel asks us or rather challenges us to take up.”

“The break-in, the intrusion, of a logicist structuralism into the theory of the unconscious can be illuminated by using the terms ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’; one thinks for instance of the two types of watch face described by those terms.”

“A structuralist psychoanalysis is content with a binarism that is juridical, totalizing, and without subtlety and always bears the trace of normativity.”

Jean Laplanche, “Structuralism before Psychoanalysis”

This year’s haul from the annual Hyde Park secondhand book sale!

I’m looking forward to reading the later discussions when women are actually present and begin to participate.

I was also pleased to see that Aragon pointed out that because they largely excluded women the discussions privileged chauvinist conceptions of sex.

It was also good to see participants—such as Raymond Queneau and Louis Aragon—push back against Breton’s moralizing and his homophobia.

Something I found surprising (and charming) because I didn’t anticipate it: the surrealists debate seriously the role that succubi and incubi play in both sexual fantasy and sexual reality.

PS. I am *not* asking about or interested in your favorite podcasts or video essays.

Can anyone recommend (or is anyone willing to share) a syllabus or list of articles and books that could serve as an introduction to horror studies? Philosophy, literary criticism, film studies—whatever comes to mind! I’m trying to get into the spooky season 🎃🧛‍♂️🎃🧙‍♀️🎃🦇🎃

Jean Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture.”

I find this to be especially strange given many relational analysts professed adherence to the hermeneutical philosophy of Gadamer, who wrote two very helpful phenomenological studies of the dialectic of Plato and of Hegel…

JoAnn Wypijewski’s short introduction to this book does it a great disservice imo

“Of course the psyche can die through disintegration… but there is also a death of the psyche caused by excessive synthesis and rigidity—death by the ego. From this point of view, Lacan’s criticism of the ego as an instance of fascination and immobilization… remains valid.”

Jean Laplanche

In his “New Foundations for Psychoanalysis” Jean Laplanche outlines (as part of his general theory of seduction) why psychoanalysis requires a theory of drives, and offers an account of the elements of the drive, which explain why the drive is *not* instinctual (or self preservative).

I stopped by Powell’s in Hyde Park today and picked up something cool!

It would also require that relational psychoanalysts subscribe to an epistemology that they usually claim to reject: positivism!

I suppose if one were a pragmatist or a constructivist one could argue that they force the term to mean what they need it to mean. But that would be to confirm its status as a floating signifier that partly organizes a theoretical and political discourse or style.

It becomes a kind of floating signifier in their discourse and is often called upon to mean something very different from what it meant to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, or Marx (who all, of course, give it a different meaning and significance based on their own theory and practice).

Whatever I feel about Jon Mills I think he’s right that—with a few notable exceptions, like Jessica Benjamin and Thomas Ogden—the American relational psychoanalysts tend to employ the term “dialectic” without understanding what it means in philosophy and critical theory.

Watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Kairo” for the first time tonight. Really good. Probably the best J-Horror I’ve seen since “Noroi.”

This thoughtful retrospective review gives a nice account of its themes and its aesthetics while situating it historically:

aspectfilmjournal.web.unc.edu/2023/09/ashb...